The Art of Homage

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Here’s a common literary conundrum: who much should you assume your readers know going into your novel? Explain too much, you risk condescending; explain too little, you risk being esoteric and possibly confusing. With small aspects of a book, it’s all about deciding what’s necessary information. If a certain piece of information is absolutely vital, then err on the side of explicitness. If not — if, say, the information is merely for thematic or subtextual reasons — then depending on a reader’s knowledge (or their inquisitiveness to go and look it up) is probably best.

But what if your entire book is based on another one? What if a certain piece of information (in the cases of these books, a writer or a specific novel) is foundational to your text? How, then, should you proceed? Should you explain the referenced work so that those unfamiliar with it can enjoy your book? Or should you simply accept that some readers will fall behind and end up befuddled? It’s a tricky enterprise, and since there are as many ways to pay homage to earlier literature as there are ways to create new literature, I thought it would be useful to see how some contemporary writers approach this finicky issue.

Let’s get right into some examples. The most straightforward way to pay homage to another writer is to simply write them into the narrative. Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection Wild Nights!uses the voices of famous authors on their final days. In “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House,” Poe keeps a diary tracking his new post as “Keeper of the Light” for a lighthouse in Viña de Mar. His first entry is dated October 7, 1849, which was the date of Poe’s death (hence the title). Oates has a lot of fun playing with both Poe’s style and his Gothic genre. On his second day, Poe wakes from “fitful” sleep that seems to “cast off totally the morbid hallucination, or delusion that, on a rain-lashed street in a city not familiar to me, I slipped, fell, cracked my head upon sharp paving stones, and died.” Oates captures the language of Poe, as well as his ceaseless morbidity. Would readers unfamiliar with Poe’s biography recognize this description of Poe’s actual death in Baltimore? Or will they miss the hint? Will it matter if a reader does not know that “The Light-House” was the last piece of fiction the real Poe was writing before his death? And that Oates here even quotes from it? Does any of this really matter? Oates, consummate (and unbelievably prolific) storyteller that she is, makes the narrative compelling even for the uninitiated, but it’s interesting to consider how knowing certain things will change the experience of reading the story. Those who know something about Poe will instantly spot the date of his death and know that this is the tale of some sort of afterlife, while those who don’t know Poe will figure it out as the story unfolds. Which is the better experience? Who is reading the story in the right way?

Of course, there are plenty of historical novels that feature authors as characters, but those aren’t the kind I’m interested in here. I’m more interested in those works that aim to riff or play with past fiction, the kinds that are unafraid to run with the ideas of other writers, too, not merely their biographies.

Michael Cunningham wrote two books that take as their inspiration other writers’ works. His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours examines Virginia Woolf’sMrs. Dalloway via three women engaged with Woolf’s novel in different ways: composing it, reading it, living it. But it’s Cunningham’s lesser-known Specimen Days that I’m interested in here, because it explores its foundational text in such unusual ways. Though its title is taken specifically from Walt Whitman’s book of autobiographical essays and sketches, Cunningham’s novel could be said to take Whitman himself as its foundational text––Specimen Days celebrates Whitman’s spirit as much as any individual work, though obviously Leaves of Grass is the primary model. The novel is really three thematically linked novellas, each focusing on a man, a woman, and a young man. Whitman’s presence pervades the stories, yet he remains elusive. In the first section, “In the Machine,” Lucas, the boy, refers to the great poet as “Walt,” like a close friend. Set in the late 19th century, “In the Machine” recounts a fire at the Mannahatta Company (named, of course, after a poem of Whitman’s), a factory near Washington Square. As the blaze ravages the building and innocent workers leap from windows to escape the flame, Lucas thinks he sees something: “Was that Walt, far off, among the others, Walt with his expression of astonished hunger for everything that could occur?”

“The Children’s Crusade,” the second piece, features a detective in 21st-century New York investigating a series of terrorist bombs instigated by an old woman who quotes Whitman. “What are you saying, exactly?” the detective asks the woman, who replies, “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.” To which the detective says: “You know your Whitman.” Her minion of boys, who call her Walt, since she believes so much in the beauty of the world as Whitman wrote it:

To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don’t rot. Our children aren’t a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There’s no dung in the milk. There’s milk, as much as we want. The church can’t roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can’t stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to. And look at us. We’re so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they’re murdering eight-year-olds, or both. We’re getting divorced faster than we’re getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn’t, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn’t get poison, they’d put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can’t build new ones fast enough. We’re bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn’t find those countries on a map, we couldn’t tell you which continent they’re on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women’s breast milk. So tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?

A far cry from the America Whitman described, isn’t it? (Though the world of the first story, Whitman’s world, serves to considerably undermine this nostalgic, revisionist view.) That Whitman would be used as motivation for terrorism seems plausible here. Cunningham engages with Whitman’s texts (and Whitman-as-text) in as many ways as he can: what did Whitman’s poetry mean to those who were alive when he wrote it, who could witness the same New York depicted in the pages of Leaves of Grass? What does Whitman’s America say about our America now? What does all that suggest about the future (which is dealt with in the final story, “Like Beauty,” set in New York 150 years from now)?

I read Specimen Days concurrently with Leaves of Grass, which at the time I was reading for a class. It was a wonderful pairing: I grappled with Whitman’s absorbing poetry at the same time I got to read a novelist do the same thing. Cunningham doesn’t expect you to have read Whitman, as he provides quotes and even some analysis along the way, but I would wager that my experience was greatly enhanced by my immediate knowledge of Whitman’s writing. For no matter how much shorthand Cunningham provides, Whitman defies summary. Leaves of Grass enfolds you with its endless lists and keen observations and joyous optimism. One can read Specimen Days and “get” Whitman’s place in it without having read a word of his poetry, but to feel it, to attach more philosophical and emotional resonance to the book’s themes, to understand its “multitudes,” you need Whitman himself.

Memories of those books ran through my mind as I read Maya Lang’s debut novel The Sixteenth of June, which has the rare claim of being a book based on a book that’s based on another book. The title date is, of course, Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’sUlysses is set. It is also the date fans of Joyce’s modernist epic come together for an annual celebration. The Sixteenth of June features such a party, but not just any Bloomsday, but the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. The party is thrown by the Portmans, a wealthy couple in Philadelphia. Their two sons, Stephen and Leopold, are name after Ulysses’s protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Leo, the younger son, is engaged to a woman name Nora, like Joyce’s wife. Long’s novel has the same number of chapters as Ulysses and employs many of the same techniques. It is, in other words, wholly dependent on Joyce’s novel.

Ulysses, famously, is based on Homer’sThe Odyssey. The idea was to take one of literature’s greatest epics and pare it down to a single day of a human life. The grand in the ordinary. But Joyce goes so much further: he meticulously crafted Ulysses to mirror Homer’s tale of Odysseus and his journey home. He famously said of the book, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” An egotistical claim, to be sure, but one that has yet to be disproved––here I am today, still writing about this goddamn book. In a letter to his Aunt Josephine, Joyce suggested that she read The Odyssey first. “Then buy at once,” he continues, “the Adventures of Ulysses (which is Homer’s story told in simple English and much abbreviated) by Charles Lamb…Then have a try at Ulysses again.” Joyce, then, expected his readers to not only enter his book having already read The Odyssey, but he also wanted them to pore over the text to decipher its innumerable mysteries.

Maya Lang, in The Sixteenth of June, expects no such thing. Her novel is a lovely, light-on-its-feet production, a flowing narrative of young people trying to find their way. Twenty-somethings Leo and Nora have reached an impasse in their relationship: engaged with no wedding date, in love but static, together but growing apart. Leo’s brother Stephen, also Nora’s best friend, plods along at grad school, seven years into his dissertation. Their day begins with the funeral of their grandmother, a woman the family had mostly forgotten about, relegated as she was to a nursing home (“And nursing home is a misnomer,” their father says, “It’s a social living community for seniors”). But before she died, Stephen had begun to pay visits to her, unbeknownst to the rest of the Portman clan. When Stephen’s secret is exposed, questions abound about his intentions. Michael and June Portman, the parents, decide to hold their Bloomsday centennial despite the funeral happening on the same day, a decision that irks Stephen considerably.

One needn’t have read James Joyce to understand this kind of family dynamic. In fact, for the first 50 pages or so I wondered if maybe intimate knowledge of Ulysses might hinder my enjoyment of Lang’s book. I couldn’t help but trace Joyce’s influence on every page, even occasionally spotting some passages lifted directly from Ulysses, as in the introduction of Stephen: “Stephen fills the white bowl with hot water. He cups the bowl in his hands and carries it to his desk, where a mirror and razor lay crossed.” This echoes the famous opening of Ulysses, which goes: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.” A bit later, Leo recalls his time in London, where “[there] was no freak-out about cholesterol, fat. They ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,” which Leopold Bloom also did in the beginning of his day. Other references aren’t direct quotes: as Stephen contemplates his life, he considers:

How much easier to just go along and agree. To watch the trajectory of the ball long ago set in motion and see where it will land, as though you are not the product of its outcome. To watch as though you have no hand in your own life. As though the only words we have available to us were written long ago in a blue book. As though we cannot make our own stories, decide our own fates.

Ulysses, when it was first published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922, featured a blue cover with white lettering, so people eventually referred to it surreptitiously as “the blue book.” Lang is having a bit of funny in this pensive moment: Stephen, as a character, can’t make his own story; he’s stuck in someone else’s.

Strange that my knowledge of Ulysses actually distracted me from a story predicated on it. Typically, I would imagine the opposite being the case. But luckily Lang’s wonderfully engaging prose and her believable characters overtook me, and soon I forgot to look for allusions and just enjoyed the novel.

One of the most enjoyable things here is the way in which Lang traces her characters’ thoughts. Leo, Stephen and Nora alternate the point of view, and Lang settles herself comfortably in their skin, a fitting technique for a predecessor of Joyce, who mastered free indirect discourse better than maybe any other modernist except for Virginia Woolf. But the spark that makes Lang’s methodology unique in its own right is the way her characters think about the things they might have said to someone. Repeatedly, Leo and company imagine conversations that did not happened, almost as much as we’re given conversations that actually did happen. This is not unlike the “double stream of consciousness” that Morris Ernst emphasized when he defended Ulysses in court in 1933, (“Your honor,” Ernst said in court, “while arguing this case I thought I was intent only on the book, but frankly, while pleading before you, I’ve also been thinking about that ring around your tie, how your gown does not fit too well on your shoulders and the picture of John Marshall behind your bench.”) except here it is as if Lang’s characters, like all of us, are trying to live out a hypothetical other life for themselves, to experiment privately with a life that could have lead but ultimately did not. And sometimes these unspoken words contain within them the thing most necessary to say: Leo wishes he could ask Nora “what it feels like when she pulls” her hair, a condition known as trichotillomania that has afflicted Nora since her mother’s death; Nora wishes to confront Leo’s mother June for her haughty and cruel condescension; and Stephen dwells on the things he would have said to Nora about her relationship with Leo, which Stephen thinks has hindered her development as a person and artist.

This kind of thinking takes up much of our lives. We regret the things we said as well as the things we didn’t say, and moreover, we think about those things all the time, a constant process of rewinding and rewatching and dreaming of rewriting. But, as Joyce points out, “It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.” We can only move forward, but that doesn’t mean our minds are not stuck in the past.

Most of the characters in The Sixteen of June either don’t like Ulysses or haven’t read it (or, often, they attempted it and stopped). Stephen is even skeptical that his parents, the ones throwing the party, don’t even really like Ulysses: “I sometimes think,” he says, “they’re more interested in what Ulysses says about them than what it actually says. Our truest relationship with books is private. I love Gatsby. I love Mrs. Dalloway. But I would never throw a party for them. A party ends up celebrating not the book but its title.” Nora never got through and it seems that Leo never even tried. This accurately reflects contemporary attitudes of young people toward Ulysses. To them, it is not “the great repository of everything,” as one character puts it, but a pretentious, irritatingly confounding book, with few rewards and annoying champions (“His work is Everest,” the same character says, “No one climbs Everest and says nothing of it!”). Yet here they are, these young people, caught in a story, a world inescapably shaped by Joyce, for no matter what you think of his most notorious novel, it has influenced you, it has defined and refined your ideas of literature, art, obscenity, human thought––even if you disagree, even if you are indifferent.

Homage is a way of acknowledging our forbearers, to celebrate where we came from by updating the past, calling back to it, poking fun at it, challenging it, embracing it, adoring it. Oates goes at it directly, Cunningham a little more abstractly, and Lang indirectly and directly. There is no right way to pay homage any more than there is a right way to love something. And asking yourself how much information you should expect your readers to know is ultimately fruitless. They’ll come into your book with so much more baggage than a knowledge of or respect for a given writer or novel. They bring their pasts into it, too, with all its force and unaware influence. What they know doesn’t matter, because the division between a reader who isn’t familiar vs. a reader who is amounts to a false dichotomy. There is actually an infinite number of ways to experience a story, and no writer can predict them all. Oates and Cunningham couldn’t foresee how much their readers know, just as they couldn’t foresee anything about them. Lang doesn’t know if you’ve read Ulysses; probably she doesn’t care. She wants you to feel her characters think and live (and think about living); the Ulysses stuff reinforces many of the themes, functions as a big blueprint, and serves as the occasion of the novel’s central set piece, but its nuances are not crucial the work as a whole. So if you’re paying homage to someone, to something, to anything, just write it the way you love it––passion is more important than knowledge, anyway.

Jonathan Russell Clark
is a literary critic. He is a staff writer for Literary Hub and a regular contributor to The Georgia Review and The Millions. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, The Atlantic, The New Republic, LA Review of Books, Read It Forward, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, PANK, and numerous others. For more, visit jonathanrussellclark.com or follow him @jrc2666.

This guest post comes to us from Daniel E. Pritchard. Daniel works in production, sales, and marketing for David R. Godine, Publisher, in Boston. He has now read The Prospector. He is also a co-founder of The Pen & Anvil Press, The Boston Poetry Union, and writes a regular blog on literature and culture called The Wooden Spoon.“You peaked early,” my girlfriend says. It might be true, sad as that would be. Not to sound too Nick Hornby here, but a certain type of person runs into major achievements like this in their twenties and feels, immediately, that this is as good as it will ever get. I am that kind of person. The path of my career (and temperament) doesn’t seem to be pushing me towards major publishing companies, and Nobel Prizes are usually the playground for big boys. They were noticeably absent from this one, leaving all the fame and street-cred for small independents. It is fair to say that I – like my boss, David Godine – will go the length of my career and have this happen just once. This is that once. I am twenty-five.Let me emphasize that I had nothing to do with acquiring, editing, or producing The Prospector (link to more info on the publisher’s site), the J.M.G. Le Clézio novel brought out in 1993 – when I was twelve – by David R. Godine, Publisher. Of the many books that I had read on the Godine list, The Prospector was not among them. Nonetheless, on the morning we heard, I was absolutely beaming. I called my mother. I called my girlfriend. I called everyone. I gushed to the Falafel King at lunch. Of course, I’m aware that any pride I feel regarding Le Clézio’s Nobel Prize is purely by association: this is very much an Olympic games for literature. He’s one of ours, so we won. In a peculiar, not uncomplicated way.But in thinking about all this between frantic calls to printers and bookstores, there might be a more substantial sense of victory in this year’s Nobel. David Godine took a huge chance on an unknown (in the US) French author, on the basis of a recommendation by Gallimard’s rights manager – one book lover to another banking on a “no marketing” zone. He printed 6,000 copies of that first hardcover edition (“I must have been on drugs,” David told a Publishers Weekly reporter last week) because he thought it was a good book. The book was well-reviewed and sold well enough, and was the first in a list dedicated to works of literature appearing in English, in the US, for the first time, called “Verba Mundi.” It’s a good thing.We had 420 copies in stock from that original printing of The Prospector, fifteen years ago, on Thursday, and were taking back orders by Friday morning: vindication by sales. Godine is one of four publishers in the US, I hear, to carry Le Clézio’s work, along with the University of Chicago, University of Nebraska, and another small trade press whose name escapes me [ed note: Curbstone Press]. It’s a banner moment for independent publishing. I can’t speak for the other houses, but at Godine, Le Clézio’s appearance in English is based entirely on the personal taste of David Godine, who still acquires our titles and who has picked up the work of important, unheralded authors such as Georges Perec and José Donoso since then.For what it’s worth, I think that this year’s Nobel highlights a great and unfortunate weakness of American publishing. Not the charge that we don’t keep track of every author in every language in Europe, which is a Herculean task, perhaps impossible. Rather, that introducing and supporting the work of authors from around the world as part and parcel to being a publisher is an idea that seems to be fading. One expects not that all the work of Europe (and elsewhere, ahem) is published in English, but that American publishers get behind some author who, to their tastes, is great; is capital-G great. That they take a significant chance. Translation isn’t a nice thing you do if you can spare it, which is the way most publishers regard it; translation is essential. If evangelizing new, unheard-of authors isn’t integral to the reason a person goes into publishing, then why? It’s not for the fame, fortune, or the stylish tweed jackets. I have at least one of those, and I’m still pretty miserable.You have to want this one moment, when you feel sure you’ve won something good for the culture, that you’ve introduced something new and important to the world. Even if it only lasts a day or an hour before, you know, reality sets in. Thursday morning. Three people in the office. The New Yorker is on the phone: tell us about this author.Bonus Links:Le Clézio Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Prizewinners: International Edition

Something doesn’t feel right about defining my novel, about giving it a genre (a word that has always conjured for me cover images of bursting corsets and rippled abdominals). Something doesn’t feel right about defining novels at all.

How to explain that feeling of astonishment and relief that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet engenders for so many readers, especially her recent Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and concluding volume? It’s easier perhaps to talk about the tumultuous lives of Elena and Lila, their determination to do the very things that will destroy them, the complex and contradictory plots of female friendships. Easier perhaps to ponder Ferrante’s reclusiveness and speculate on her identity rather than what she reveals about our own. Easier to talk about female friendship rather than face the dark underbelly of all human relationships. In the end, easier to find some way — perhaps any way — to avoid the wounds Ferrante opens and probes for 1,500 pages. What is Ferrante dissecting and how does she keep us attending breathlessly in her operating room?

The Neapolitan quartet is, among other things, a novel of expectations and friendship, not only Elena and Lila’s, but by extension those of women from less-than-affluent circumstances during a period of great social change in the later 20th century. What is possible for them and the men in their lives? Against those possibilities and with the framework of European feminist thinking, Ferrante explores their passionate desires and social limitations. I’ll venture that her encompassing vision of human experience, the aliveness of her characters, and her unique voice rank with those of William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and Charles Dickens.

1. La FrantumagliaFerrante’s female characters suffer from la frantumaglia. The Italian verb frantumare means to break into pieces, to shatter. Frantumazione, a noun, means a breaking or a shattering, and frantume are the shards themselves. According to Ferrante, in her Paris Review interview, la frantumaglia is a Neapolitan dialect word meaning “bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head not always comfortably.” There is no comparable word in English, though unquestionably the feeling exists. La Frantumaglia is also the title of a collection of Ferrante’s essays and responses to interviewers. The book is not yet available in English, but here is a translation of Ferrante’s description.
From her dialect my mother left me one specific word that she used to describe how one felt when one was pulled here and there by contradictory feelings that tore her apart. She said that she had inside a frantumaglia. La frantumaglia (she pronounced it frantum-maglia) depressed her. At times it made her dizzy, caused her a metallic taste in her mouth. It was the word for a discomfort, illness not otherwise definable, manifested out of the throng of heterogenous things in her head, like refuse on turbid water of the brain. La frantumaglia was mysterious, caused mysterious acts, was the origin of all suffering not attributable to a single obvious reason…Often la frantumaglia made her cry, too, and the word remained in my mind from childhood to define first of all the crying that is sudden or without a reason one is aware of: tears of frantumaglia.
Ferrante says that these bits and pieces are the origins of her novels. Indeed, all of Ferrante’s novels recreate la frantumaglia both in structure and content. For example, in the Story of the Lost Child, Elena begins a complicated relationship with Nino Sarratore with whom she has been infatuated at various times since childhood and who is also a fraught connection with Lila, Elena’s friend and one of Nino’s previous lovers. It is as if Elena goes to a high school reunion and learns that someone she’s always had a crush on shares her feelings, and thus impassioned, the two pursue a relationship consisting of equal parts lust, self-deception, fantasy, rage, guilt, despair, and exhaustion.

The following scenes occur in quick succession early in The Story of the Lost Child and together they recreate something of the experience of la frantumaglia. Against the advice of Lila, her mother, and others Elena has finally left Pietro, her husband, and her children and is attending an academic conference with Nino in Montpellier, France. Initially, she feels liberated.
Of the days in Montpellier I remember everything except the city…I felt the limitations of my outlook, of the language in which I expressed myself and in which I had written…It seemed to me evident how restrictive, at thirty-two being a wife and mother might be…I felt freed from the chains I had accumulated over the years…It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.
When the truth of earlier warnings about Nino’s character soon becomes apparent, Elena ignores these signs. The two have separate rooms, she says, but “We slept together, clinging to each other, as if we feared that a hostile force would separate us in sleep.” Then, Elena assumes a less liberated stance:
During the day I went with him to the assembly hall and, although the speakers read their endless pages in a bored tone, being with him was exciting; I sat next to him but without disturbing him.
At lunch, Nino converses in various languages, and Elena is “struck by Nino’s mobility.” Her pride in Nino and in their relationship coincides with doubts about herself. A kind of disappearance of self occurs:
There was a single moment when he changed abruptly. The evening before he was to speak at the conference, he became aloof and rude; he seemed overwhelmed by anxiety. He began to disparage the text he had prepared, he kept repeating that writing for him wasn’t as easy as it was for me, he became angry because he hadn’t had time to work well. I felt guilty. Was it our complicated affair that had distracted him? —and tried to help…To me the speech seemed as dull as the ones I had heard in the assembly hall, but I praised it and he calmed down…That evening one of the big-name academics…invited him to sit with him. I was left alone, but I wasn’t sorry.
So great is Elena’s admiration for and pride in Nino that she is happy to sit back unnoticed. This stance, however, leaves her an outsider in other ways, too. For example, when Elena and Nino meet a French couple, Augustin and Colombe, Elena observes that Nino and Augustin “began to criticize the speakers. Colombe joined in…with a slightly artificial gaiety. The maliciousness soon created a bond.” Elena observes but doesn’t participate in their petty bonding.

In the next paragraph, Elena thinks of her children and is drawn away from Nino and the “liberating” experience of being with him.
Suddenly my world and theirs were back in communication…And the children’s bodies rejoined mine, I felt the contact violently. I had no news of them for five days, and as I became aware of that, I felt an intense nausea, an unbearable longing for them. I was afraid of the future…
Elena is no longer free, no longer able to do as she wishes, and this reality humiliates her. Though it is after midnight, she telephones Pietro to ask about the children, and Pietro rejects her inquiry. Frightened, she goes to Nino’s room for consolation, but hesitates when she overhears Nino talking to someone, perhaps his wife, on the telephone. Nino denies that he has contacted his wife. Elena says:
“I refused for a long time to make love, I couldn’t, I was afraid that he no longer loved me. Then I yielded, in order not to have to believe that it was all already over.”
Elena becomes even more anxious and insecure. In an effort to hang on to Nino and their time together, she urges that they accept the invitation to return to Paris with Augustin and Colombe, but this decision only raises more questions about their relationship:
The journey wasn’t always pleasant: sometimes I became sad. And I quickly formed the impression that Nino was talking to Colombe in a tone that he didn’t use with Augustin, not to mention that too often he touched her shoulder with his fingertips. My bad mood gradually worsened, as I saw the two of them were getting very friendly. When we arrived in Paris they were the best of friends, chatting away; she laughed often, smoothing her hair with a careless gesture.
When Elena asks Nino about his feelings for Colombe, he is irritated:
“Do you want to quarrel?”

“No”

“Then think about it: how can I like Columbe if I love you?”

It scared me when his tone became even slightly harsh; I was afraid I would have to acknowledge that something between us wasn’t working.
Despite her belief in her own liberation, Elena finds no reassurance or security in her own talents.
It was as if, since I loved Nino and he loved me, that love made everything good that happened to me and would happen to me nothing but a pleasant secondary effect.
Elena is not far from the mark. Somewhat later, she tells Nino about the success of the negotiations to have her work published in France.
He seemed very excited. But, then, sentence by sentence, his displeasure emerged.

“Maybe you don’t need me anymore,” he said…”You’re so involved in your own affairs there’s not even a tiny spot left for me.”
Nino demands Elena meet him in Naples for Christmas and then fails to show up. Elena says, “I didn’t have the strength to leave him.” Still later Nino confesses that he had earlier prevented the publication of one of her articles because “I couldn’t bear that you were so good.” Tellingly, Elena says, “Suddenly, starting from that moment, I felt that I could always believe him.” Ferrante discusses this feminine strategy of disappearance in her Paris Review interview:
It’s a feeling I know well. I think all women know it. Whenever a part of you emerges that’s not consistent with some feminine ideal, it makes everyone nervous, and you’re supposed to get rid of it in a hurry…If you refuse to be subjugated, violence enters in.
What could be more violent than Nino’s cavalier disregard for Elena and her work, especially when it is disguised as love?

Ferrante’s minute dissection of this constant oscillation in women’s psychological and emotional experience, perhaps especially in relationship with men, is not duplicated elsewhere in serious fiction that I’m aware of. Proust’s lapidary observations document from a sociologist’s distance while Elena’s frank and frequently unpleasant revelations arise from insight within and in the moment. Elena’s denial of what is happening with Nino is not merely ironic, as we might expect with a somewhat unreliable narrator, but horrifying, as if we’re looking into the abyss with her and are as powerless as she to avoid it. In this way, both the organization and structure of the writing and the content itself are the experience of la frantumaglia. The reader shares Elena’s desperation and desire to escape, but her ongoing uncertainty keeps us turning the pages because we cannot look away.

2. Il Quartiere
Ferrante depicts la frantumaglia as an inherent state of mind, but we see that it is based in what society and culture demand of women, particularly women with backgrounds like Elena and Lila’s. Americans with their orientation to land, space, and future may find it difficult to imagine or understand how the pull of Elena’s Neapolitan neighborhood could so completely inform Elena and Lila’s lives and their decisions. Americans like to consider their origins much less important than they are, and typically believe social mobility more possible than it likely is. They often regard their neighborhood as a temporary location, something that can be established anew wherever one goes and likely improved upon. Hence, we have “starter houses.” I think this attitude is reflected in the complaints I sometimes hear that Elena is “too self-involved” and “should get over herself.” After all, she went to school and bettered her situation. She did well. She succeeded. She got out. It was unfortunate that Lila didn’t go to school, but she bettered herself anyway, maybe more so than Elena.

American social mobility is never a realistic possibility for Elena or Lila no matter how much education or status each gains or whatever their talents and skills. That this could be the case may seem incomprehensible to Americans, but Italians readily understand the pull and push of the quartiere, the neighborhood. It is the place that defines you and your social class from birth, especially if you are poor like Elena and Lila’s families, the Cerullos and the Grecos. Historically, Italian cities like Naples have been organized around parishes. Though it may be less true today, there is typically a church, a piazza where people gather, and a street where people both live and make their livings. The residents seldom leave the quartiere, and some live their entire lives within a very few, crowded blocks. This miniature society has its own history, social classes, politics, wars, grudges, intrigues, and love affairs. Gossip and custom are its currency, and fear and violence its weapons. The permanent influence of the quartiere is much more encompassing than that of most American neighborhoods.

As in the novels of Elsa Morante and Vasco Pratolini, the quartiere in Ferrante’s novels has a persona and is a character. This vivid sense of place gives a particular energy to Ferrante’s novels similar to the role of place in Faulkner’s south, Dickens’s London, and Proust’s drawing rooms. The Snopes and the Solaras have much in common. Pip seems as ambitious and conflicted in his expectations as Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo are in theirs. Issues of status and class pervade the works of all of these writers.

The quartiere marks Elena no matter how far she goes or how high she rises. Montpellier offers her new perspective, but it is temporary:
the impression that my boundaries had burst and I was expanding…and was “proof that the neighborhood, Naples, Pisa, Florence, Milan, Italy itself were only tiny fragments of the world and that I would do well not to be satisfied with those fragments any longer…I felt the limitations of my outlook, of the language in which I expressed myself and in which I had written…it was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.
From her new perspective, Elena views Lila with a certain degree of smugness:
She was mired in the lota, the filth, of the neighborhood, she was satisfied with it. I, on the other hand, in those French days, felt that I was at the center of chaos and yet had tools with which to distinguish its laws.
And later:
I noted…the rigidity of the perimeter that Lila had established for herself. She was less and less interested in what happened outside the neighborhood. If she became excited by something whose dimensions were not merely local, it was because it concerned people she had known since childhood. Even her work, as far as I knew, interested her only within a very narrow radius…she had never moved…
Elena’s exchanges with her in-laws belie her claims of escape from these Neapolitan origins.
[Elena’s father-in-law] began to praise Nino, but not with the absolute support of years earlier. He said that he was very intelligent…but—he said, emphasizing the adversative conjunction—he is fickle…Sarratore is intelligence without traditions…
When Elena asks Adele, her mother-in-law, what “intelligence without traditions” means, Adele replies:
That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else. The result is that this Signor Sarratore is an unreliable person.

“I, too, am an intelligence without traditions.” [Elena says]

Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable.
Despite her remarkable success as a writer, the quartiere remains Elena’s milieu, drawing her back to where she came from. She acknowledges that it is the source and subject of her writing and doubts that she can write if she loses contact with her origins. Lila who has never left is the conduit by which Elena maintains this creative lifeline and a source of inspiration. For Ferrante, the quartiere (and by extension the city) is a mythic place and exerts a mythic power.

Unlike many writers, Ferrante is not concerned with beauty of form or with pretty writing per se. Her prose is intentionally raw and direct. In fact, it can sometimes be difficult to remember that Ferrante’s work is fiction, not memoir, when the boundary between fiction and reality seems so thin. Similarly, she turns the conventions of fiction to her own purposes. From the Paris Review interview:
I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn” and “I renounce nothing that can give pleasure to the reader, not even what is considered old, trite, vulgar, not even the devices of genre fiction.” And later, I use plots, yes, but, I have to say, I can’t respect the rules of genres…In the Neapolitan Novels, the plot avoided every kind of trap set by fixed rules and convention.
Though Ferrante’s plots are as entertaining and compelling as those of detective stories, she has a larger purpose that is founded in the cultural and social changes in the conditions of women starting in the 20th century and supported by her continuing commitment to feminism. Again, from her Paris Review interview:
I wouldn’t recognize myself without women’s struggles, women’s nonfiction, women’s literature — they made me an adult.

My experience as a novelist…culminated, after twenty years, in the attempt to relate, in a writing that was appropriate, my sex and its difference.
Ferrante also identifies Morante’s first novel, Menzogna e Sortilegio (House of Liars), as inspiration for her own explorations of the intersection of passion and societal demands. She is committed to saying the unsayable. From her Vanity Fair interview:
Often that which we are unable to tell ourselves coincides with that which we do not want to tell, and if a book offers us a portrait of those things, we feel annoyed, or resentful, because they are things we all know, but reading about them disturbs us. However, the opposite also happens. We are thrilled when fragments of reality become utterable.
I don’t intend to spoil the ending for those who haven’t yet had the incredible pleasure of reading The Story of the Lost Child and will instead simply offer the observation that the conclusion for me marks these novels as a full account of what it is to be an artist and a woman in our time. Elsewhere, Ferrante has likened the quartiere to the labyrinth, and one imagines Lila the figurative minotaur at its center. I believe Elena and Lila can be seen as singular, two sides of the same figure. Elena cannot write without Lila. Lila cannot speak without Elena. It doesn’t give away the end of the story to say that only when Elena slays the minotaur, i.e. her dependence on Lila for inspiration and creative energy, can she finally believe her work is truly her own. Only by taking back the power she attributes to Lila can she truly leave the quartiere.

Ferrante validates women’s experience in a way that recognizes our common humanity. Her work distinguishes between who we are and the imprint of social class and origins. It may seem a stretch to consider Ferrante in the same breath with Proust, Faulkner, and Dickens, but I’m convinced of her stature as one of the greatest writers and artists of this or any other time. All give us a world of such scope and insight that they establish another reality within which we can understand our own experience in ways that permit us to be more integrated and whole than we otherwise would be. If this is not truly the greatest art, what is?

1.When I started running, I was stately, yes, but too plump, and I took to the roads in the morning to take in the crisp air and give myself a bit more margin of error to drink beer. About half a decade later — a year ago now — I found myself waving goodbye to my wife on a chilly, wet October morning as she drove out of the empty parking lot of Mount Vernon, once George Washington’s estate on the banks of the gray Potomac River, back to our warm home, 19 miles away, and our kitchen, and two cats, myself left with just a bag of water on my back, an MP3 recording of an Irishman reading seeming gibberish for 35 hours — i.e., James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness dirge Finnegans Wake — and a GPS watch to track it all. And, of course, space-age sprays and pastes slathered on my peaks and valleys to prevent chafing.

I was training to run my first marathon — 37 and falling apart, bald and still too fat in most places, but human adaptability is a glorious thing, and somehow after training all of the hot summer it seemed the old meat machine would be able to finish the race. Knock on wood. Trust your training. Never trust a fart. Etc. I’d made it through the acute brutalities of a DC summer (85% humidity at 5:45 am, and hot) with just one long run left. After this last monster, the worst that remained would somehow be just a non-issue 12 miler, then taper taper taper (for non-runners: heal up) and ta da, the race, and then done. I would get my body back, and my weekends, and my mornings.

Forget the aches and the pains and the miles. The time commitment alone was real and grueling: Almost three hours of weekday mornings spent running before work, and then a long run on Sunday of another two and a half to three hours.

A month or so into the 18-week grind, though, I found that the gift of this training was the gift of reading. Hours and hours of long runs, just get those miles in, and after a while music is too complicated, the rhythms — too often the slightest bit off — make feet fall wrong. So: audiobooks. That summer I “read” better and more by listening than I had been able to in years. As a younger man I had swallowed whole catalogues of author after author. Since 2004 or so, though, I hardly read a book or two a year.

I’ll spare you and myself the excuses — this problem (like so many other things) was my failing and not the world’s. But eight miles on a Wednesday morning, or a Sunday 15…that’s real time, for real “reading,” available nowhere else in my life. And God bless it. Over the course of the summer I “read” story after story from a Haruki Murakami collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and all of Rachel Kushner’s Flamethrowers, and a good lot of Jonathan Franzen’sPurity.

So back to that Mount Vernon parking lot morning. I had reached the emotional (if not literal) end of my training. One more long run and I‘d be done. All that would be left would be to stay loose and rest up for the marathon. But things had gone too well, and I wanted more. The running books I’d read said not to push past 20 miles in your training runs, certainly not for your first marathon. The reason: there’s no gain to be found in pushing into or through the awful last six miles, where your body and soul leave you with nothing but the one, two of foot in front of foot dragged by acid-soaked muscles and the thought that there is beer and something else at the end but I forget what. For the sake of your emotional wellbeing, just do that once. Save that unique joy for race day.

Like I said, I felt things had gone too well. So, for this last run, I wanted to up the mental game somehow, maybe simulate the brutality of the last six miles without running them. What better way to test my fortitude than by hammering my head with the legendarily impenetrable Irish jibberish of Finnegans Wake? If I can run 20 yammering nonsensical miles, then an extra six with folks cheering most of the way instead: easy, right? Maybe easier.

It seemed a good morning for my project, I thought, as my wife and I drove to Mount Vernon, cold and gray and wet. Irish weather, maybe, myself having never seen Dublin. And, frankly, good running weather too. Better a chill and a wind you can fight with the fire inside than the crushing of the sun and heat.

I stepped out of the car into the dreary Mount Vernon parking lot and put on the silly safety-vest-looking backpack full of water. My wife took the wheel and drove quietly out of the parking lot, a full and sane day ahead of her. I waved to the tail-lights as they dimmed in the mist and, trotting off towards home, I pressed play.

The running was fine and predictable, the first couple miles just working through the accumulated tightness of the preceding months and past each joint’s initial grumbles. The book pushed quickly through the first page or two that had punished me repeatedly for daring to start reading it a couple times over the years. As the minutes passed, a sort of awareness of scene filtered through the earbuds, if only barely. Early on, for example, a museum guide walked us (the readers) through what must have been pages of exhibits of I’m not quite sure why it mattered. For example:
“This is the flag of the Prooshi- 11
ous, the Cap and Soracer. This is the bullet that byng the flag of 12
the Prooshious. This is the ffrinch that fire on the Bull that bang 13
the flag of the Prooshious.?”
This is Derek’s sullen resignation.

But then we moved on through the miles, the book and I, past the museum, and…

Not as bad as I thought. Somehow, easier? Easier even than a narrative book? I’ll admit there were times over the hundreds of miles this summer when I was not laserbeam focused on the intricacies of Murakami’s blind willow dream, or, in Flamethrowers, the Moto Valero slipping turning tumbling across the salt flats, or men of various ages, nationalities, and levels of familial relation leering at Franzen’s Pip. Moments when I’d catch and hold an image then let it envelop me as my feet kept hitting ground, caught frozen smiling in the wave before it broke and rolled back, my attention and any context washed away with it. Or the realities of the run took over: when stop lights or carb packets or blessed cold water was king, the audiobooks slipped to Charlie Brown teacher sounds and rhythm in the background. But here was a book that was all a waterfall of images sound and rhythm and yes on some level so much more, but on a run it could be just sound and rhythm, and if you catch a bit in English here and there all the better. And if not, it just enveloped me as I swerved along that last long run by the river, beating the bending path back to my castle.

Other than the museum guide, the first surprise of Finnegan’s Wake to wash over me was the rap music. Multiple times in first five miles (at my pace, the first hour of the book) I found myself thinking back to “Alphabet Aerobics” by Blackalicious. And I could swear that Joyce namechecked at least a couple lyricists in the first 100 pages: Black Thought, and Meth. I was surprised somehow to not hear the names Raekwon or Ghostface Killah, even though the book’s random access style shares more DNA with the Chef and Ghost than with Method Man. But one does not get greedy when writing a paragraph about anachronistic name dropping. Run on.

In college I read Ulysses with and for and because of the secondary texts and concordances and the desk and time big enough to hold it all. Peek under the page and see the scaffolding made of strings. Pull a string and pull into your lap The Odyssey or Shakespeare or the intricacies of then-contemporary Irish politics. Delight in the architecture and in your own appetite for a “difficult” book. Impress your friends and wow (bookish) lovers. On the run two decades later, however, my ears were just big enough to hold the dance of syllables, if that, but in that: liberation. I could not be expected to figure it out. And to be clear, I didn’t. No place for concordance here. No strings or scaffolding.

Here’s what happened (I think) in what my MP3s call the first 100 pages or so: the world was created, as were people, as was Dublin. People had a lot of sex. People did a lot of drinking, and got drunk. At least one person, and likely more, peed, seemingly (hopefully) outdoors. I’m pretty sure I may have secreted to the bushes myself in the course of those pages. Men stood trial for their offenses. Maybe the peeing was the offense, or one of them, or maybe not. I faced no censure myself for peeing into the bushes. Not even a judging glance.

And a few miles on, after the rap, there were other echoes, this time literary. First, of Joyce. There was a cyclops in Ulysses and a guy named Bloom, and both, or the sound of both, in the Wake. And did I hear Dedalus? Like Ulysses’s Bloom, another Joyce avatar. But then echoes of other books, as I passed other stretches I’d run before training for this race. Here, on this stretch of path near the parkway, was where Pip rode the bus out to see her mother, and here next to the airport I remember the dinner where it became clear that Valero’s mother in Flamethrowers was truly awful. And later on, foot after foot, echoes too outside of the other books even, because here on this bridge earlier in the summer it was too hot and my water ran out in 87 degrees and I started to get deep chills in the beating summer sun, which I’m not a doctor but I took to be a bad sign. Hard not to flash on that.

Exactly halfway through, a pub. “Stop,” the sirens wail.

Many miles on, deeper echoes too of my life before all that. I grew up here and once back up over the bridge into the city I’m seeing that little stage near the Washington Monument where I swear I conducted a marriage of two women in front of thousands of people before a Fugazi concert in 1995. So many Fourth of July chaos evenings chasing explosions of fireworks friends and beer. The parades and inaugurations I cheered or screamed at (W. Bush and Obama, both — just align my reactions with yours, and read on). All of this, and every heaving sweating awful summer run coming back with every step across DC soil. So deep in, but almost home. Riding the rhythm of the Wake but long past the words.

And then, the gutpunch realization that I owed the gods 20 miles but home was just over 19 from where I started. With three miles left the legs were tightening, and the red light stops more frequent, and with the tank so low how to push on when home was just a left turn away? But one of the few things I think I remember from Ulysses and The Odyssey is that one is not home until it is earned, that physical proximity was not enough and it was the extra that makes it real. So once at my house, 19.4 miles from Mount Vernon, and .2 from a ferociously needed shower, I kept on straight and not left, looping the park by my house in a stumble, and pushing a bit more, to get somehow to 20 miles, legs barely there, stopping immediately once the last decimal turned, and

wow.

done. and stop this Irish mumbling, phone. I want my brain back. Just a block or two to the door. My wife had mentioned breakfast of bacon and fruit, even though it was past noon. And there was leftover pizza as well. And there, my door, my house. Home.

I stumbled to the door, legs aching but still my heart was going like mad. My wife opened the door, and I saw the bacon and pineapple and pizza warming in the oven, and she asked me would I go clean up while she poured me a beer and yes I said yes I will Yes.

2.And that was last year. I ran the race, the 2015 Marine Corps Marathon, and finished, although I was not fast. My wife made signs and popped up five places along the way and passed me a dry pair of socks halfway through. They were magic, those socks, and now I know to pack a pair or two for this year. As I finish writing this, I’m wrapping up training for the 2016 Marine Corps Marathon. One 20-mile training run down, and the second this weekend. I ran the first with a friend. I may run the second with Joyce again for old times’ sake. My wife and I have (lovingly and amicably) separated, and my training runs now also echo the many morning miles we had shared over the last few years. And I cannot wait for it all to be over, the training, and then for it all, next year, to begin again just right where it left off.